Ep. 3: A New Take on the Dental Receptionist Position
Why are dental office receptionists so undervalued and under-trained? And why don’t most dentists realize this oversight is costing them majorly in terms of potential patients and income? In this episode, we discuss the role of the receptionist, bringing on special guest Jeff Santone to share some staggering statistics and horror stories from placing mystery calls to dental offices (2:36), and then Sabri Blumberg joins us to provide simple guidelines for training your receptionist to be more effective at handling the phones and getting new patients in for appointments (22:01).
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QUESTIONS FROM THIS EPISODE
How many new patient callers actually schedule an appointment?
Fewer than you'd think. In a study by dental marketing firm Viva Concepts that reviewed 10,000 recorded real new-patient calls, just under 23% of callers actually scheduled. That means the average practice is losing more than 7 out of every 10 new patient calls it pays marketing dollars to generate.
What did MGE's mystery calls to dental offices find?
Out of 454 mystery calls made as a polite, professional price shopper, only 7 offices (under 2%) handled the call well enough that the caller would have scheduled. Roughly 20% of receptionists turned unpleasant the moment price came up, callers were referred to other offices three times and hung up on twice, and a caller reporting discomfort was offered appointments anywhere from four days to two months out.
Why do receptionists fumble price shopper calls?
Usually it's not rudeness, it's training. Shoppers are normal (everyone shops), but an untrained receptionist put on the spot by "how much is a crown?" doesn't know how to answer, gets irritated, and either quotes a price and hangs up or stumbles. The deeper mismatch: the newest, greenest employee is typically handed the most financially important calls in the practice.
How should a receptionist actually handle "how much does a crown cost?"
Get the caller's name and contact information, then ask questions: what makes you think you need a crown? Explain that price depends on the type of crown and what the doctor finds, offer a wide range if pushed, and steer toward a complimentary consultation or second opinion. The receptionist's primary function is bringing the patient in, not playing doctor or insurance coordinator over the phone.
What is fixing phone conversion actually worth?
The average practice getting 100 new patient calls a month schedules about 23. Raising conversion to just 50% adds 27 new patients a month, and with the average new patient worth about $1,200 in first-year collections, each month's additional patients represent roughly $32,000 in collections. Few investments in the practice pay off faster than training the person answering the phone.
Episode Transcript
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Jeff: Do you want more new patients? How many more a month would you want? Are you doing any marketing to get them? If you're like most doctors, you probably are. But there's something going on in your office, and I say that with confidence because I've now seen it play out time and time again. Unless you are part of a very small group of offices, there's something going on in your practice that is probably preventing you from getting at least 50% more new patients than you could be getting.
And that's what we're going to talk about on this week's episode of Dental Business Rx. Specifically, we're going to discuss rethinking the dental receptionist position. So this is a first for us: we're going to have some guests this week. I have a special guest, Jeff Santone, our new Client Services Executive, and another guest, Sabri Blumberg, our Deputy COO here.
We're going to be discussing, as I mentioned, a real problem, an insidious problem going on in dentistry that you may not even be aware of in your practice. What is the actual problem? To what extent does it go with the receptionist position in dental practices across the United States? And what should you be doing about it, now, today, to start improving it in your office?
So let's first look at this reception position. Normally, who is the receptionist in a dental practice? Normally, it's the newest employee, because it's an entry-level position. It tends to have more turnover than, say, a hygienist or a dental assistant or a financial coordinator. It's usually the new person. You put them on answering the phones. That's usually where they gravitate: oh, they're new, I can at least teach them to answer the phones. But I want you to keep something in mind. They are the first point of contact in your practice. This is the first impression someone is going to get of your office. And if you're like most practices, the receptionist also schedules patients. You may have someone else who schedules existing patients, but at least they're fielding those calls when they come in for the first time.
One thing we've found over the years: obviously, most dentists want to get more new patients. That's a no-brainer. So how bad can this get? Let's take this idea that the receptionist is the first point of contact and usually the newest employee, and you have dentists who really want new patients and are marketing to get them.
There's a marketing company out in Southern California, good friends of ours, called Viva Concepts. Viva did a humongous study on new patient conversion. They listened to 10,000 phone calls: recorded calls of new patient prospects calling in to schedule an appointment. These weren't mystery calls where someone was calling the office as a fake new patient. These were actual new patient calls. Listening to 10,000 calls, and that took fortitude in and of itself. Keep that in mind. That's a long time.
What percentage of those 10,000 calls, in other words, how many of those 10,000 people who called in for various reasons, and they might have been shoppers, they might have been people asking "do you take my plan," they might have just moved to the area, what percentage do you think actually scheduled an appointment? I'll let you think about this one for a second. Tapping my fingers on the desk. There you go. Alright, time's up. 23%. Out of those 10,000 calls, about 2,260 actually scheduled an appointment. A little below 23%.
So now transpose this to your office. If you get 100 new patient phone calls, and you are the average dentist in the United States of America, only 22 to 23 patients out of those 100 phone calls are scheduling. So you're spending all this money on marketing, and whether you're spending a lot of money or not, you're doing something to generate these incoming calls. Maybe you're doing SEO, maybe you're doing PPC, maybe you're doing postcards. And if you're the average office, more than 7 out of 10 of those people calling in are not scheduling.
So if you look at these two factors, we take the newest, greenest employee, and the fact that new patients are so important to our practice, and we marry these two things together, it really doesn't work out all that well.
And I've known this statistic for quite some time. Here at MGE, we're a practice management education and coaching company, so we've been aware of this. We've done things with it over the years. But recently, we decided to do mystery calls. This is the concept where one of our employees calls your practice as a new patient to rate your receptionist. We advertised the idea of a mystery call to the dental profession. This was a new client acquisition thing for us, a way to talk to prospective clients that might have problems they want to solve. Our software, HubSpot, records the call if you're in a one-party consent state, where only one person has to consent to be recorded. And if you're in a two-party consent state, we have a specific form we fill out that tells us what happened on the call. Then normally we would call the doctor and discuss our findings.
And this is why I want to bring on Jeff Santone, our Client Services Executive. What we found making these calls was so bad, you just have to hear it. So Jeff's getting set up now. Jeff, are you on?
Jeff Santone: Yeah, I'm here.
Jeff: Okay, good. So Jeff is here. Jeff, I was just telling everybody how bad it could get. Now folks, don't get too depressed about this. We're going to tell you how bad it is, and then we're going to bring Sabri on at the end, and she's going to tell you what to do about it. Just remember that. Okay, so first off, can I ask you some questions, Jeff?
Jeff Santone: Yeah, please.
Jeff: How many calls did you guys make exactly?
Jeff Santone: We made about 454 calls.
Jeff: Okay, 454 mystery calls. Can you tell everybody the setup? What were the circumstances? How did you introduce yourselves? What did you say?
Jeff Santone: We called like a patient would. Most patients call and they don't say much, they just ask a question. So we were starting with price shopping: "How much is it for a crown?" We'd just start off with a question. We were polite. We were professional. We wanted to be scheduled. Nobody was rude or aggressive. "I just want a price on a crown." It was just an inquisitive thing.
Jeff: And what happened? What was the word you used when I asked you? It wasn't "horrible." It was...
Jeff Santone: Disgusting.
Jeff: Disgusting. And I hate when interviewers cut people off, but I just have to say this. I saw Jeff, and he just looked so downtrodden after making some of these calls. I asked, "How's it going?"
Jeff Santone: "Yeah, I'm just disgusted." Those were my words. And it's because, as a former practice owner, being on the receiving end of those phone calls, the new patient phone call was the most important thing in the world. We're in a bubble, right? Being here at MGE for the past few years, making phone calls as a vendor, I expected to be treated as a vendor, the way I used to treat vendors calling: you're never going to talk to a doctor.
Jeff: So if you're calling in from MGE, it's a little tougher to get through to receptionists. That's understood.
Jeff Santone: And I understood that. The receptionists were rude, they were short, they were curt, not really interested in talking to me, because I'm a vendor. That didn't change when I was a new patient. I thought they would be more interested in helping me get an appointment. And I think it's the nature of the shopper phone call. There's a little bit of a "no time to talk to you, I ain't got time for this" mentality, I thought. But I was trying to be inquisitive. And we did over 400 of these phone calls across our whole team, between the four of us making calls, and only seven of those phone calls were handled to the point where, if we were to make an appointment, which we would never do, we would never schedule on somebody's book...
Jeff: Now, hang on, because people ask about that. I had that question. How did you do this? Let's say you got to the point where you've got this really sharp receptionist and they're going to appoint you. How did you handle that?
Jeff Santone: I gave them a really good, "This is awesome. I really like what I'm hearing. I definitely want to schedule. I just need to check with work." I'd give myself that out.
Jeff: Got it. So that way you didn't end up on the doc's schedule with a no-show. That would just be awful.
Jeff Santone: I'd feel awful. So we did that many phone calls, and only seven where I felt, "Man, I would definitely come to this office."
Jeff: Do you mind if I clarify that? So, 454 calls. Seven offices. And you called as a shopper, so you weren't saying "hey, I'm new to the area." A little tougher.
Jeff Santone: It is a little tougher.
Jeff: So out of 454 calls, seven offices actually scheduled you. What percentage is that?
Jeff Santone: It's less than 2%.
Jeff: Wow. Okay.
Jeff Santone: And many of them were pleasant. I don't want to say they were unpleasant. 80%, I would say, of the people you talk to are pleasant. They're just pleasantly not scheduling you. And it was tough to try to explain that to a lot of the doctors, if they even listened to the call. Most doctors didn't even want to hear the call, which was interesting in and of itself.
Jeff: What do you mean, they didn't want to hear it?
Jeff Santone: They didn't want to schedule time to listen to the call. "No, I'm not interested in listening to the call."
Jeff: It's like, "Would you like to look at your X-rays?" "No. Don't want to look. Don't want to know."
Jeff Santone: And the guys who did listen, there were many who said, "Wow, she was really nice." And I said, "Yeah, she was pleasantly not scheduling me." And they couldn't quite make that distinction. And I understand it. You do want somebody pleasant at the front desk, but that pleasantness can become robotic. What we found is that on about 9 out of 10 of the phone calls, they just didn't care. There was no interest in why I'm asking about the price of a crown. We got to the point where we thought, maybe it's the price shopper angle. So a couple of the guys doing these mystery calls, and myself, changed it to: "I'm price shopping because I'm in discomfort."
Jeff: Okay, so not a full emergency in pain, but something's sensitive.
Jeff Santone: There's some discomfort. And the fastest I could get in with discomfort was four days. The furthest out was two months.
Jeff: Wow.
Jeff Santone: So it was, "I'm in discomfort." "I have something two months from now." And I'm just thinking, "Wow, okay, you don't have anything sooner?"
Jeff: Can I stop you there? And I have to bite my tongue, because I want to make sure people hear you, since you're the one who did this. But think with that for a second. I am the receptionist at a dental practice. My job is to get people in and help expand this business, and I'm pushing off a new patient who's in discomfort for two months. It's guaranteed they're going to call somebody else.
Jeff Santone: Yes. Without a doubt. Even if I would have scheduled that appointment, I would have hung up the phone and called the next office.
Jeff: Heck yeah. "Let me hold onto this for two months just in case?" No.
Jeff Santone: The four-day one, I may have scheduled the four-day. But I was definitely hanging up and calling the next office. So it was shockingly awful. And I'm so dismayed, because as somebody who was on the practice end of it, these doctors are having problems financially. They're having problems dealing with insurance. And these are $10,000 cases that are not being scheduled. They're just not coming in. There's no interest. There's no follow-up. And the doctors I did talk to who were willing to listen to the phone call, I'd ask, "By the way, did you hear about this phone call? Was it made known to you that a patient was calling in with four crowns they needed done?" "No." And these guys had call tracking services. They had number tracking.
Jeff: Did you ask if they listened to any of their own calls?
Jeff Santone: I did. They don't.
Jeff: It's interesting, because you deliver most of our New Patient Workshop, which is where we do all of our marketing training. Dynamite service, by the way, little plug here: if you want to find out more, go to newpatients.net. Do you bring up call tracking at the workshop? Do you ever survey how often people listen?
Jeff Santone: I never surveyed, but of the guys I called and talked to who had call tracking, they were asking, "When was that phone call?" And I gave them the date and time, because I was thinking, "You could go back to your call tracker." Meaning they're not listening to their phone calls. Part of it may be that it's all lumped into every call that comes in, with services like Weave, versus a call tracking number with a dashboard. But I was not shocked to find out they're not listening to those calls on a regular basis.
Jeff: I think that's pretty routine, because I've seen it with newer clients. When I'm giving one of the sales seminars and I ask, "Raise your hand, who has call tracking?" Everybody raises their hand. "How many people listen?" Like one hand goes up. I'm like, "What? Come on, guys."
Jeff Santone: I wish they would listen, because there were a few times I called to give a report and the doctor said, "You were just super rude to our staff." And I was like, I was rude? "That's what she said. You were rude, you're pestering the office." That's a time you wish you did have the call recorded. Because if they're saying that about how a patient called in, and that's why this didn't go well, I'm wondering how many other times that has occurred.
Jeff: Did you ever have somebody say that when you had the call recorded?
Jeff Santone: No. Never. Because the doctor can listen to that call, and I can ask them, "Was I being rude, pushy, unprofessional?" And they all would say, "No. That's a great patient. We should have gotten them in." And it's really easy with those mystery calls, because I make them establish what pieces of information they want to get. We get agreement before we even listen to the call, so they can grade it based off what they said, not off what I said.
Jeff: And you brought some more numbers. Can you break those down? You already went over a couple, but I want to hear the whole breakdown.
Jeff Santone: Yeah. We talked about the seven that were done well, where I would schedule. Then there were actually about 20% of the phone calls, 91 of them, where we would estimate they were just unpleasant. They shouldn't be picking up the phone. They weren't nice. It was clear we were bothering them.
Jeff: Can I ask, sorry to interrupt: did you notice they became unpleasant when you brought up that you were a shopper, or when they answered the phone?
Jeff Santone: They answered the phone, and then once I asked for the price of a crown. You can't get a lot out of "hello," but you can find out a lot by how someone answers the phone. The offices that would say the office name and the staff member's name tended to be on the pleasant side.
Jeff: Really? Interesting.
Jeff Santone: Where we would get people who would just say "doctor's office" and not give their name, which I always think is weird when someone picks up a phone. They might be somewhat pleasant, but the minute I asked "how much is it," there was attitude in it. And a lot of times, the way they would buy time is by trying to confuse me as a patient. They didn't know how to answer the question "how much is a crown?" "It depends on the type of crown." And as a mystery caller, I would latch onto that, because most patients would think, "What do you mean by type of crown? Why would I know there are types of crowns? Is this a zirconium crown?" So I took them down that rabbit hole, and I allowed them to never gain control of the conversation, just because I kept asking the questions that were confusing me. "What's a build-up?" They never explained a build-up. "I'd better call my other office." It definitely changed their tone. Their attitude towards me changed when they heard I was interested in a price. Some of them would just give me a price and try to get off the phone. "It's $1,225." "Okay, thank you." No questions asked of me. And if they wouldn't give me a price, I would push them: "How about just a range? I don't want to waste your time." They would do that and just try to get me off the phone. It got bad on a couple of them. I was referred out to another office.
Jeff: How many times were you guys referred out?
Jeff Santone: I was referred out twice. Once to another office literally down the road. I had to clear it up. I asked, "Just because they do orthodontics?" And they said, "No, they do all of it. Just like we do." And I said, "So they're the office I should call?" "Yes." Okay, good. And then one time, I got referred to the Board of Dentistry.
Jeff: What? The dental board?
Jeff Santone: The dental board, yeah. "Maybe you should call the dental board and find somebody who just does it based off insurance numbers and who's the cheapest. We're not..." And I didn't understand that, but okay, fine.
Jeff: Wow.
Jeff Santone: I got hung up on once.
Jeff: Okay, so you had the totals. 454 calls. How many times were you guys referred out?
Jeff Santone: Only three times, across the team.
Jeff: How many times were you hung up on?
Jeff Santone: Hung up on, only twice out of all 454. No one was super rude. But one of the guys who works for us said he was put on hold at least five times for more than five minutes, and he just hung up.
Jeff: Wow.
Jeff Santone: And that's where, like you said, there's not the allocation dedicated to the reception position. That person should be in a bubble. They should not be handling another phone call. They should not be handling somebody who's walking up to the front. Like I said, it's shocking, and it continues to be shocking. You would think you'd have this priority for that front desk position. It's part of the staffing issue, and the doctor issue for sure: not making it clear that you should just bring somebody in for free.
Jeff: So you mean like a free look-and-see, or a free consult?
Jeff Santone: Yeah.
Jeff: That's interesting. So you've got the 23% number from Viva. You came up with 2% as a shopper. And you're finding that 20% of the people, the second they found out you were a shopper, became a little off-kilter. But if someone's desperately trying to get new patients to fill their practice up, and collect more and produce more, it's like pouring something into a leaky bucket. And 80% is leaking out.
Jeff Santone: Yeah. And just so you know, when we got a price, I always responded with, "Wow, that's much cheaper than what the other office quoted." And then I'd pause. I'd stop.
Jeff: And?
Jeff Santone: "Yeah, we do great work here." Not, "Come in right now."
Jeff: It's so maddening.
Jeff Santone: But it's a training issue. It's a top-down issue. It's an ownership issue: not making the rules and guidelines clear. No staff member is going to take it upon themselves to offer a free consult and X-ray, for fear of retribution when one of those patients comes in who's not a great patient and the doctor goes, "Why'd you give it to him for free?" It has to be something that's set up in the office.
Jeff: Has to be. And this is why we're going to bring Sabri on. But Jeff, thank you so much. "Sobering" is the best word I can think of. And for you folks listening, I say this with the utmost affection: you're probably not listening to your calls, which I know Sabri's going to get on you about when I bring her on. But at least it opens the door to doing something about it, doesn't it?
Jeff Santone: It sure does. There's something to handle there, and it's easy to get new patients up if you just handle the phones.
Jeff: I love it. Okay, good, Jeff. Thank you so much for coming on.
Jeff Santone: Thank you. Jeff: Alright. We're going to bring Sabri in here in a second, and I'll introduce her. But before I do, I should mention, and we meant to bring this up while Jeff was on: if you'd like to get a mystery call for your practice, we put the link in our podcast description. If you have trouble finding it or using it, just go to mgeonline.com and send us an inquiry, or call us at 800-640-1140 and ask for a mystery call, and we'll get it set up for you.
Alright, that brings me to Sabri Blumberg. I want to tell you a little bit about Sabri. Obviously, you'll notice we share the same last name. Sabri and I have been married for quite some time. Sabri is our Deputy COO, and she's also our senior technical supervisor at MGE, meaning she's in charge of all of our delivery. And I know this is a bit of a trite saying, but she's forgotten more about running a dental practice than most people will ever know. Have I set you up well enough there, babe?
Sabri: Yeah. I'd better perform now.
Jeff: Good. Alright, so I know you have a few points you want to go over on this. What can these folks do right now to start improving this scene in their practice?
Sabri: I guess the first thing I want to mention is that this is not a new problem. The new patient conversion rate in dentistry has traditionally been bad. It's just that more and more people are starting to track it and really notice it. And in today's day, when people are very focused on getting more new patients, they're seeing that it's difficult to get new patients if you don't convert them properly.
So, what do we do about it? You already went over the fact that you need the right person on reception. The idea of bringing in entry-level people: there's nothing wrong with bringing in entry-level people. That's great. But don't just put them on your phones. Here's the thing: it's actually alright to bring in an entry-level person, as long as you have spent the time training that person before you put them on reception or have them handle those phone calls. Usually, reception is the position in a dental practice where we put somebody to see if they're going to make it in that practice. You definitely don't want to put somebody on reception and then find out, when your stats crash, that they're probably not the right person for your business. Just like with any position in dentistry, reception being one of them, you want to make sure you train the person before they start answering the phone.
Now, what does that mean? Very often, we forget to tell the receptionist what the real purpose of the receptionist job is. Why are you here, and what is your main function in reception? Obviously, reception has multiple functions: greet the patient when they come in, create a friendly environment, make sure the patients are taken care of, make sure any communication into the office is routed properly and quickly. But one of its functions is to bring the patient in. And that is the main function of the receptionist: to bring people in. It is not to answer their questions, or to become their doctor, or to become the treatment coordinator or the insurance coordinator and explain their benefits to them. The receptionist's job is to bring the person into the practice. Any questions or concerns the patient has are going to be answered in the practice by the proper person: the doctor, the insurance coordinator, and so on.
Jeff: If you don't mind me interjecting: it almost precedes training. It's orienting them. Because one of the things Jeff mentioned was that a lot of the receptionists were very pleasant. They're friendly. They just didn't schedule him. And the doctors who did listen to these mystery calls said, "Oh, she was very pleasant." Most people are pleasant. But that doesn't necessarily get the person in.
Sabri: Correct. They forget, or they haven't been trained or told, that their primary function is to schedule the patient and bring them in, whether that's an existing patient or a new patient. So if somebody's calling in asking, "Do you take my insurance?" or "How much do you charge for a crown?" or "How much do you charge for a cleaning?", whatever their concern may be, however the receptionist is trained to answer that question, the answer is always aligned toward bringing that patient in. Not answering the question and ending it there.
Jeff: Now, can I put you on the spot? Because I want to give the folks at home something, and this has been rolling around in my mind. Our mystery calls were all shopper calls, and then they changed some to discomfort calls, and one of those got scheduled two months out.
Sabri: Oh.
Jeff: Yeah. It keeps getting worse the more I talk to Jeff about it. But one of the issues he noticed: 20% of the receptionists were rude or short, and it was always when he asked how much a crown was. Then they became instantly not nice. And I know a lot of folks out there, when they think of shoppers, have this attitude: shoppers are bad. What are your thoughts on that?
Sabri: How many people shop for things? If I go looking for a car, I would shop that car. If I can get the exact same loaf of bread somewhere else, I would probably go with the cheaper one if it's the exact same product. So you have to understand that shoppers are not necessarily bad. In their mind, they may not realize that there's a difference in the type of crown, the materials used, the skill of the doctor, the type of office they're in, and that those factors all influence the price. There's nothing wrong with shoppers. Some people do it, some people don't. They're still human beings, and they need dentistry.
Jeff: It's interesting you say that, because when you said it to me, the first thought I had is: when people get antagonistic, it could be that they're just a rude individual, in which case, why is nobody monitoring this receptionist? That one's obvious. But sometimes people get antagonistic when they feel put on the spot.
Sabri: Right. They don't quite know how to answer the question. "How much is a crown?" They don't know what to say, so they feel irritated. They know they shouldn't just answer the question, but they also don't know how to handle that patient so they still schedule. When you put somebody on the spot, sometimes they become irritated or antagonistic. So sometimes it's a training thing: they can't smoothly handle it. And if a receptionist has an attitude towards shoppers, that attitude needs to be changed. There's nothing wrong with somebody shopping.
Jeff: Do you want to do a little demo for folks, so they can see it?
Sabri: Sure, if you want to.
Jeff: I think that'd be kind of cool. Let me ask our podcast production crew: we're supposed to give them practice success in 30 minutes or less. I think we've killed the 30-minute thing here. Sorry, folks, it's going to be like 42 minutes, or whatever it ends up. Okay, so we're going to do a demo call. I'm a shopper. You're the receptionist. So I call, and you answer the phone.
Sabri: Hello? ABC Dental, can I help you?
Jeff: Okay, that wasn't very friendly.
Sabri: That was terrible. You put me on the spot. I was trying to think of a name. Alright, let's try it again.
Jeff: Ring.
Sabri: Hi, ABC Dental. Can I help you?
Jeff: Yeah, I was calling to find out how much you charge for a crown.
Sabri: Okay, for you? I'd be happy to answer that question, but I need to get a little bit more information, because there are different kinds of crowns. Now, before I get into that, can I get your name?
Jeff: It's Jeff.
Sabri: And your last name, and your phone number. I would get all the basic information from you first. Okay. So the first question I have for you: what makes you think you need a crown?
Jeff: Oh, I saw a dentist, and I had some problems on the left side of my mouth, and the doc told me, actually, he told me I needed four crowns.
Sabri: Oh, wow. Okay. All on the left side of your mouth? Do you know why you need four crowns?
Jeff: I don't know. That's what he said.
Sabri: Are there crowns on those teeth right now?
Jeff: No. I've had fillings on a couple of those teeth, I think. I got them a long time ago.
Sabri: Okay. This is what I can tell you, Jeff. There's a big range in crowns, depending on the type of crown that you need. If you don't have crowns on these teeth right now, the first thing I would like to do is have the doctor take a look at them, to determine whether he would even crown these teeth or not. And from there, because dentistry is a little bit subjective, I would like to get our doctor's take: do you need a crown or not on these teeth, and if you do need crowns, how many do you actually need? And at the same time, if you do need crowns, have the doctor explain to you why you need them, and how much we charge for them, depending on the kind of crown he's going to place. Do you have dental insurance?
Jeff: No.
Sabri: You don't. Okay. We actually have a new patient special right now where you can come in for a complimentary second opinion. So it wouldn't cost you anything to come in and have the doctor take a look. Why don't I just schedule you to come in, he can have a look, and you can get a real answer to your question. When would you like to come in?
Jeff: Alright. And then you schedule me. Now, what's interesting, and I brought that up because we've seen this play out time and again: when someone is shopping, normally, if I just went to a dentist and that doctor told me I needed one crown, chances are I'm not shopping.
Sabri: No, not for one. But usually for three or four, you are.
Jeff: Usually when somebody's shopping, there's more to the story. That's why I find it so silly when someone adopts this weird viewpoint about a shopper. First off, everybody shops. And then they adopt this attitude, "Ew, it's a shopper," but you're throwing away potentially a great new patient.
Sabri: Absolutely. And obviously, this patient didn't fully get their questions answered, which is why they're now calling you. So why don't you help this person? What I find most important when you're talking to a potential new patient is that you actually talk to them. Really talk to them. You can't always have a script for this. But what you can do is teach yourself to communicate, or put somebody in reception who already has good basic communication skills, is genuinely interested in people, and has training and drilling on the basic questions they're going to be asked, so they know how to answer them properly. And you put me on the spot like that.
Jeff: I thought you did awesome. I didn't want to throw you off track, but I thought that's what people would want to hear. I could be completely wrong. We're going to find out.
Sabri: We're going to find out. So I guess I also gave you the second point, and that is: you really have to make sure not only that your receptionist knows their primary function is to bring the patient in and get the patient looked at by the correct person in the practice. You're not going to diagnose whether this person needs four crowns, or what kind of crowns they need, over the phone, and you need to let the patient know: I really can't do that. Second of all, you should know what your new patient offers are. Do you offer complimentary second-opinion consultations? Do you have a new patient special for cleanings, for people who don't have insurance, or whose insurance you don't participate with? The receptionist needs to know these things. They need to know what questions they're going to be asked, and they need to be able to competently handle those questions, while always orienting the patient towards: come on in. Come on in. That's what you want.
Jeff: Interesting. Now, one thing I noticed, and someone's definitely going to try to bust us on this, so I should bring it up. You'll notice I didn't push for the price. I was pretty easy when I scheduled. But let's say, in that scenario we just played out, I then said, "Yeah, but how much does a crown cost?" What would you have told me?
Sabri: It could be anywhere between, let's say, $700 all the way up to $1,500.
Jeff: So your base crown, whatever it is, 800 bucks or 1,000, up to a crown with a build-up and whatever. So a very wide range.
Sabri: Exactly. But the one thing I would always push, when somebody really insists, "Okay, but how much does it cost?": I would say, "Listen, you have nothing to lose. Your consultation is complimentary. We don't even know if you need a crown yet. But the one thing I can tell you is we have a great doctor here, and he is going to take great care of you. And ultimately, you do want those teeth handled, because you're calling people. So why don't you just come on in? It's really the best way we can answer your question."
Jeff: Love it. I figured I'd bring it up, because I didn't push the issue on price. But you would just give them a big range, basically.
Sabri: Yeah. Give them a big range.
Jeff: Cool. You can tell we talk a lot. Alright, good. So you went through your first two points.
Sabri: So the point being: you really need to make sure the receptionist not only knows what they're going to be asked, but has drilled it.
Jeff: Explain "drilled."
Sabri: We're talking about role-playing. I'm the receptionist, and somebody else is the patient, just like you and I did. You do this with the receptionist over and over, all these different scenarios, until they can easily handle each one. You start off easy, and then you make them more difficult. You might start off with not really pushing for the price, then really pushing for the price. Then: what if it's more expensive? "The other guy told me it was going to be this much. This is how much you're going to charge?" How would you answer that? You do lots of different scenarios, until the receptionist can find their own words. You can start with a basic script, but ultimately it's going to sound best in a person's own way of expressing themselves. That's really what you want.
Jeff: Makes total sense. Okay, so that's point number two: really drill it.
Sabri: And obviously, you as the practice owner have an executive responsibility to oversee this person. Whether it's you or an office manager doesn't really matter, but somebody has to listen to these calls.
Jeff: That's an issue, and it came up when I was talking to Jeff. When I'm lecturing here, especially with newer clients, I'll ask how many have the software to record calls. Everybody has this stuff now. But when I ask how many people listen to them, one or two hands go up. And then, how often do you listen? Like, never.
Sabri: So it's very important. And it's interesting, because I've listened to lots of people's phone calls now, just randomly. It goes from being downright rude sometimes, and the doctor's completely unaware, to, obviously, your people who are dynamite, who are awesome. But most are in between: the receptionist is doing his or her best to handle the patient, and they're friendly and kind, and that's when you see they need correction. They haven't been trained. They don't know how to answer this, and it becomes painfully obvious as you listen to these phone calls. Just because you've drilled with your receptionist and trained them doesn't mean they're now perfect from here on forward and will never run into anything they need to review, or something we didn't cover. Or they could be doing something right, then start messing it up, and need to be corrected on that. Anybody needs supervision in a job.
Jeff: No, that makes sense.
Sabri: Make sure that you listen to the phone calls. The other thing: if conversion is what you're tracking, you want to make sure that one person is responsible for those phone calls, because it really becomes a mess when you have multiple people doing this.
Jeff: Now, this is important, and you're mentioning it very offhand. I don't mean that in a negative way, but I want to stress the importance of this, if you don't mind. Making sure one person is responsible for the calls: what do you mean by that? Because this is a big deal.
Sabri: You want one person that you trained, that you can hold accountable for the conversion statistic. That is your expert. Now, that doesn't mean you can't have backup people trained. But ultimately, when we're talking about new patient conversion, that is a statistic. It's 24%, 50%, 75%, whatever it may be. And you want to make sure that you, as an executive, know who that statistic belongs to, so you can hold that person accountable for the conversion in your office. That means not only that they're going to do a good job, because they know they're responsible for that statistic and they take pride and ownership in it. It also means you as an executive know who to correct if the statistic is not what it should be. And the staff member, in this case the receptionist, can also take responsibility for getting better when they see it starting to slip. It doesn't have to turn into a disaster before they come to you and say, "Listen, it wasn't as good last week, or this last month. I'm not sure what I'm doing differently. Can I sit down with you, and can we drill a little?" That's really what you want to see in a staff member: taking ownership and responsibility for the area of the organization you are paying them to handle.
Jeff: No, that makes sense. Okay, cool.
Sabri: And then I just want to wrap it up with: don't compromise. If you have a receptionist who's obviously not going to make it, because despite correction and drilling, they're either not getting it, or they keep making the same mistakes continuously and not learning from them, or they're unfriendly, they're rude, they're hanging up on people: that is probably not a good fit for your office. We've seen this numerous times, where someone tells you, "I've got to replace that person," but they keep them anyway. How much money is that costing you? Or my favorite: sometimes I listen to a client's staff handle a phone call, and it's rude. Just rude. I point this out to the owner of the practice: "Hey doctor, your receptionist is handling your patients that way." And the doctor's response is, "Yeah, I know. I really should be giving them more training." You don't have to train somebody to be friendly. That is an attribute they either have or they don't. It's something they should instinctively know if they're going to be a receptionist. If I have to tell a receptionist "don't be rude," or any staff member for that matter, that person is probably in the wrong industry. They should not be in the service industry. And do not ever forget that you are in the service industry. You are servicing patients.
Jeff: Makes sense. Sabri, this was awesome. Guys, you've got some great tips to start working on. Our whole objective here is to give you things to immediately start implementing, and these are things you can use in your office right away. Thank you so much for joining us today, Sabri.
Sabri: You're very welcome.
Jeff: You were awesome. And we'll wrap it up with this. I started this podcast going over the Viva study, where the conversion rate was 23%, actually a little less than that. If you want to look at the actual impact in straight dollars and cents: if you're the average dental practice seeing 23 new patients a month, that technically means you're probably getting about 100 calls a month. If you were to do a little work on this, do some of the things Sabri was talking about, do some training with your receptionist, and let's say you got conversion up to 50%, which is still not setting the world on fire, that's an additional 27 new patients a month. And the average value of a new patient to a dental practice, and by average I'm not talking about somebody lighting the world on fire, is about $1,200 in the first year. So an additional 27 new patients at an average of $1,200 each: that's roughly an additional $32,000 in collections from each month's new patients, just by handling the phones correctly. So this is obviously something worth investing time in. It's a big problem, a much bigger problem, I think, than people have suspected.
There are a couple of things I'd recommend. There's the MGE New Patient Workshop, which I talked about earlier. I would definitely try that mystery call; the link is in the description. And we do have receptionist training on our online platform, DDS Success. You can check that out at ddssuccess.com. We have a receptionist training course as well as a scheduler training course on there. This is something you definitely want to throw the kitchen sink at. Not literally, you're not throwing a kitchen sink at anybody. But even a slight improvement in this area can mean a lot for your practice.
Guys, I hope that helped, and we'll see you at the next podcast.